The present application relates generally to a system for processing the sale of goods and services and, more particularly, to a system and method for the allocation of conditional purchase offers (“CPOs”) for travel related services reservations among multiple entities or sellers within a buyer-driven commerce system.
Most systems for processing the sale of products are seller-driven, whereby the seller prices, packages, configures and offers the product for sale, and the buyer decides whether or not to accept the seller's offer. In a buyer-driven system, however, the buyer dictates the terms of the offer and one or more sellers decide whether or not to accept the offer. A “help wanted” advertisement, for example, is a buyer-driven inquiry since the employer is looking to locate and buy the services of a qualified employee. The inquiry is advertised to a large number of potential employees, who may respond by submitting their resumes to the prospective employer.
Priceline.com Incorporated of Norwalk, Conn. is a merchant that has successfully implemented a buyer-driven system for the sale of products such as airline tickets, hotel rooms and automobiles. Priceline.com utilizes a Conditional Purchase Offer Management System, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,794,207, U.S. application Ser. No. 08/889,319, filed Jul. 8, 1997, and International Application No. PCT/US97/15492 (each of which is incorporated herein by reference), that processes CPO's received from individual consumers. These CPO's contain one or more buyer-defined conditions for the purchase of goods or services, at a buyer-defined price. The CPO's are typically guaranteed by a general-purpose account, such as a debit or credit account, and thereby provide sellers with a mechanism for enforcing any agreement that may be reached with the consumer. The CPO's are provided by the CPO management system to sellers, either directly or using seller-supplied rules, for individual sellers to either accept or reject. If a seller accepts a CPO, the CPO management system binds the buyer on behalf of the accepting seller, to form a legally binding contract.
Thus, the CPO management system empowers individual consumers to obtain goods and services at a price set by the consumer. The CPO management system provides numerous commercial advantages to sellers as well. For example, the CPO management system permits individual sellers to effectively sell excess capacity when actual demand fails to meet forecasted demand. In particular, the CPO management system provides an effective mechanism for sellers to be confident that if they accept a consumer's offer, the consumer will purchase the requested goods or services at the agreed-upon price, and not just use the information to ascertain the seller's underlying level of price flexibility, which, if known to a seller's competitors or customers, could impact the seller's overall revenue structure.
For some sellers, response to an individual CPO is difficult without significant re-engineering of the existing transaction processing system. As a result, these sellers empower an agent to manage buyer-driven commerce transactions. These sellers become agency-based sellers, with a CPO management system acting as their agent. With multiple agency-based sellers, there is a need for efficient CPO management systems and methods to allocate CPO's among the agency-based sellers so as to maximize revenue for the agency-based seller and CPO management system.
For broadcast-based sellers, some form of allocation may also be desirable and/or necessary. For example, it may be desirable to allocate CPO's among broadcast-based sellers serial transmission to such sellers. Alternatively, if the CPO is sent simultaneously to multiple broadcast-based sellers, it may be desirable to have a method for allocating the CPO where two broadcast-based sellers respond at the same time. As such, there is a need for efficient CPO management systems and methods to optimize the allocation of resources and for the maximization of revenue generation.